Share-PSI 2.0 Home

Welcome

It comprises many of the government departments responsible for implementing the (Revised) PSI Directive across Europe along with standards bodies, academic institutions, commercial organisations, trade associations and interest groups. A series of workshops in 2014 and 2015 identified what does and doesn't work, what is and isn't practical, what can and can't be expected of different stakeholders.

Advice is offered as a set of Best Practices. Each of these is a stand alone document that is based on one or more case studies presented during the workshop series. Best Practices are supported by evidence of their implementation, details of which are provided in one or more guidance documents that are produced by EU Member States. These are referred to within the Share-PSI network as Local Guides. Each guide is tailored to a specific EU Member State or region, bearing in mind the local legislative, administrative and infrastructural environment in which the (Revised) PSI Directive is implemented. As well as geographically local guides, other guidance documents exist for specific sectors such as geospatial and business data.

The Revised PSI Directive

The original PSI Directive entered into force in 2003 and was revised in July 2013. It encourages public sector organisations to make as much of their information available for reuse as possible. It does not mandate that information that is not available be made so, but it does mandate that use of information that is already available should be encouraged, particularly by commercial companies, but at no more than the marginal cost of making it available. That is, the public sector should not see its information as an asset to be sold as a means to fund its regular activities.

Information can be made available in any form: written texts, databases, audio and audio visual files etc.

Advice presented in these pages is the work of the Share-PSI Thematic Network, co-funded by the European Commission under the ICT Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP) as part of the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme; Agreement no. 621012. It is not part of any W3C process and has not been endorsed by the W3C Membership.

Share-PSI 2.0 is co-funded by the European Commission under the
ICT Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP) as part
of the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme; Agreement no. 621012.
One consequence of this is that European (i.e. British) spelling is used cf. American spelling used across the
rest of w3.org